Content and context in the philosophy of Charles Taylor
Date
1998
Authors
Desouza, Nigel Andrew
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Abstract
The object of this thesis is to elucidate Charles Taylor's critique of mainstream contemporary moral and political theory. It argues that this requires understanding how this critique fits into Taylor's comprehensive philosophy, which is in tum, it is argued, based on the importance of the content-context distinction in human agency. Each chapter of the thesis examines the role of the content-content distinction in Taylor's analyses of different, but overlapping, domains: l) human agency and knowledge in chapter one, 2) moral agency in chapter two, 3) contemporary moral theory in chapter three, 4) contemporary political theory in chapter four. A major object of Taylor's criticisms is the tendency to conceive of the content of certain theories about these domains as exhaustive of our understanding of them. Taylor believes that "traditional epistemology" (ch. 1), naturalism (ch. 2), and procedural moral and political theories (chs. 3, 4) fail to come to terms with the inescapable contexts on which these domains and the theories about them depend. The thesis concludes that only with an appreciation of Taylor's sustained efforts at drawing our attention to the contexts that enable human agency can his own moral and political ideas be properly understood and some misconstruals of them corrected.